A Mobile Movie Theater Is Projecting a Galloping Horse in Thailand

With the help of Thai Film Archive, local film studio Eyedropper Fill turned a van into the popup cinema currently rolling through rural Thailand.

by Beckett Mufson

January 13, 2015, 10:15pm

A horse is running through city streets in Thailand, but it's nothing like the horses you might find at the Royal Bangkok Sports Club. The galloping steed is made of light. Its goal? To spread hope and freedom wherever it goes through the beauty of cinema. Projected from the window of a moving van, the horse is one weapon that Cinemobile—a project funded by the Thai Film Archive—is using to spread film and culture throughout the country.

To kick off 2015, the Thai Film Archive repurposed a massive truck into a miniature movie theater able to screen films for citizens who otherwise have no access to the medium. Local film studio Eyedropper Fill created an ongoing art piece, also called Cinemobile, to augment the project, and the Archive gave them a whole lot of creative freedom. "At the beginning of the project, we were clueless about what Cinemobile looks like, no one ever experienced it before," director Wattanapume Laisuwanchai told the Creators Project. A few thought experiments contemplating the purpose of animation later, the team came up with the idea to project alternating images of the Cinemobile and the speeding quadraped—which is based on The Horse in Motion (1878), the earliest known film—onto walls and streets wherever they go.

GIF by Beckett Mufson via

Currently, people in Thailand experience restrictions when it comes to free freedom of expression. "The current situation in Thailand is relatively unstable, we are under a military control, and our freedom is undermined," Laisuwanchai says. "Expressing something in public could be hard, or risky to be arrested. For example, some people got arrested just because they practiced a symbolic protest. In such a precarious situation, we believe that art is a sphere of hope and freedom, we are allowed to create a critical yet subtle dialogue to public."

One of the biggest things the Cinemobile has going for it is that it's fast, mobile, and ephemeral. The animation alerts locals to the mobile theater's presence, the Thai Film Archive screens a film, and then they can move on. But despite the risks, the Cinemobile is well worth it to the Eyedropper Fill team. "The core concept of Thai Film Archive is 'Cinema that enlightens,'" says Laisuwanchai. He remarks that most of Thailand is still very underdeveloped outside of Bangkok and a few other cities. This project could provide the first—or last—movie that many Thai citizens see, so the animated horse marches on.